Sleeping Giant Apps

Let me give you a little background on Sleeping Giant Apps. Unlike a lot of small startup iOS developers, (if it sounds like I'm over-generalising a bit here, I probably am.) our makeup is perhaps a little less "software engineer-y" than is typically the case. SG is in fact two-thirds graphic/UI designer, and a single software engineer. (Yeah, we feel sorry for him too sometimes!)

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that the stuff that has a tendency to get us (well, most of us anyway!) fired up, excited or otherwise inspired, leans heavily towards the visual end of the spectrum. A brief glance at the content populating everything from our office walls, bookshelves, bookmarks and RSS readers suggests that we're a pretty visually inundated bunch.

As with any discipline, or niche these days, aggregating all of this brilliant content (visual or otherwise) in an accessible, easily digestible format presents a particularly daunting challenge. We aggregate our news and information with RSS management tools, our network of friends and colleagues with tools like facebook, twitter and linkedin... Hell, we've even begun aggregating our aggregated content with the likes of Flipboard and now manage multiple network profiles with tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. 

One area however, that has been distinctly lacking in aggregation-y type tools (technical term) is the visual space. As design professionals, we digest mountains of visual content on a near-daily basis. Whether plowing through art and design blogs, portals and forums or jamming through dozens of art/design RSS feeds, an insatiable thirst for visually inspiring "creative fuel" is a common symptom among the design set... If only there were an app out there that kept an eye on the glut of art & design resources available on the web and presented all that beautifully inspiring bits in a tight, intuitive interface!

Design Scene, a new app developed by Lunar/Theory steps in to fill this content discovery gap admirably. Not unlike your RSS reader of choice, Design Scene gobbles content from a (growing) list of credible, high-quality art and design blogs and presents the spoils in a brilliantly simple, intuitive tile-based interface for browsing and sharing. Each tile loads an image from one of the several sources that come pre-setup with the app. To browse all those visual goodies, you simply swipe left/right within each tile. It's like an endless, visual all-you-can-eat buffet all accessible from a single interface... No hopping from site to site, waiting for entire pages to load to get to the good stuff. Awesome.

That said, should you actually stumble upon something of particular interest and want to learn more about a particular piece, or want to look at it a little more closely, simply tap to go full-screen, or click on the web-link to fire up the original source via the integrated mobile safari browser. Sharing is also a snap. While viewing a piece in full-screen mode, simply click on the share icon to fire the source over to Facebook, Twitter, email or even file the source away for later reading via Instapaper. 

If you prefer to browse content via RSS-style headlines, tilting the iPad into landscape mode will show the list of articles the app pulls its content from in a frame along the right side, while still rendering the entire tile-view on the left... The best of both worlds!

Design Scene does what it was designed to do, nothing more, nothing less, and absolutely respects the content it aggregates by not adding a slew of unnecessary functionality or UI "chrome" to dilute the material... A brilliant example of a UI that's built to support the content, and not overwhelm or distract from it. When I'm at work, looking to get inspired for a new project, I actually find myself yearning for a desktop version. There's something to be said about being able to digest all the great content out there on the web, but in an isolated, non-distracting setting. Plus, it's just that much easier to appreciate the content with all of the toolbars, copy an ads trimmed away.

Need some inspiration? Whether you're an app-designer looking for a great example of apps that do iPad design "right," a graphic artist, UI designer, or simply somebody who appreciates art and design in a broader sense, do yourself a favour and give this app a shot. It really is worth every penny... hats-off to Lunar/Theory for a fantastic job on this one.

HITS
- 50+ credible, high-quality art & design sources pre-loaded
- Intuitive tile-interface for browsing visuals
- Quick loading visuals: browse content without loading source pages, or copy
- Easily share content you discover

MISSES
- No way to quickly "bookmark" material, you'll have to Instapaper, or open in Safari first.

WISHLIST
- It'd be nice to be able to save & tag images on a server, dropbox account or similar for later reference
- Ability to compile mood boards, or simply browse saved images based on tags would be HUGE

APPSTORE LINK
http://ow.ly/4ddJ4

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Ask a handful of rookie app developers about their iOS beta testing "user experience," and you'll likely solicit a pretty consistent, groan-like response across the board. Wrangling your testers' UDIDs, the cumbersome provisioning file song and dance, compiling a new build & api file every time you want to add another test device... There's just something about the wholesong and dance that's decidedly, "less than streamlined." 

After a few go-rounds, developers eventually become less frustrated, and a little more accepting of the whole deal... Or "numb to it" depending who you ask. Which is why, when we first came across the Test Flight App website and saw the "iOS beta testing on the fly" slogan, we got pretty excited at the prospect of a less painful beta testing process. Although, "beta testing on the fly" turned out to be a bit of an overstatement, (but, no less powerful a slogan.) Test Flight does manage to take the sting out of few key parts of the beta testing process, and is a seriously helpful tool to have at your disposal.

First things first. Test Flight does NOT integrate in any way with your Apple-based dev tools. It doesn't change how you'll go about managing provisioning files, adding UDIDs, churning out new builds, etc. Bummer? Yeah, but once you hear what Test Flight does bring to the table, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised:

Recruiting testers & UDID acquisition

Once you're signed-up, you can "invite" people to participate in your beta a couple of different ways. Directly, by firing out "invite" html e-mails, or by distributing a pre-generated "invite" bit.ly link. The first, is obviously handy for getting your beta out to friends, family, or folks already familiar with you or your app... The second, is particularly handy for acquiring "less-biased" testers by simply tossing the invite link up on Twitter, Facebook, forums and the like. Whichever method is used, the process is the same for your will-be testers.

- Potential testers receive the invite email, OR hit the invite page via your direct link and click "accept."
-  Standard-issue "sign-up" for a Test Flight account. Simple stuff.
- That's it. They're essentially "signed-up" for your beta, and are prompted to log-in via their device.

Here's the good part... Upon logging in to Test Flight on their device, their UDID is auto-magically sent to the beta admin account! Meaning, you won't have to chase down potential beta-testers and have them manually acquire/provide you with their UDIDs. No additional fussing around is required on their part! All pertinent tester info can be accessed via the beta admin dashboard: UDID, Device type, OS version and email addresses.

Build Management

As I made mention of earlier, Test Flight isn't going to save you a ton of hassle in regards to pounding out new builds. Basically, at this point it's up to you to harvest the UDID info acquired via Test Flight and go through the whole provisioning file, build-churn, ipa song and dance... And yeah, you'll need to update your app's provisioning file and jam out a new ipa each time you want to add additional testers... Some things are inescapable it seems. Here's hoping Apple comes up with a way to streamline this process down the road.

Once your ipa is ready to roll-out, upload it to Test Flight via the admin dashboard and include any pertinent notes you may want to make visible to your testers (ie: fixed bugs, changes, etc.) Test Flight will keep a record of any build you upload and track a slew of stats & info for you once the build has been rolled-out to testers. Here's a quick overview:

01. Tester status - Create/manage distribution lists, see which testers' UDIDs are included in the provisioning file, view who has the build installed, and manually notify testers via email when a build is good to go.
02. Edit/Remove - Change the build notes, or delete the build entirely.
03. Reports - View individual tester activity pertinent to a build: When they last installed, status, and which devices they've installed it on.
04. History - View all previous/current builds you've uploaded & distributed, version numbers, and more importantly, how many testers have each build currently installed.

Build Distribution

This is probably my favourite feature of Test Flight, and I anticipate that a lot of developers will feel similarly the moment they distribute their first beta via this service. 

Once your build has been successfully uploaded, under the "Builds" section of the dashboard, simply hit the appropriate giant green button to "notify" testers that a build is good to go. Your testers then receive an email (to be opened on their device) with a similarly giant green button prompting them to install the build. Once your tester succumbs to the urge to press that giant green button, they're sent to the build page, where they're just one more touch away from being popped back to the home screen where your app installs exactly how it would if it were purchased via the App Store. Loading... Installing... Done!

And that, (in a long-winded nutshell) is the gist of what you can expect from the Test Flight beta testing service. Not bad, considering that you receive access to this solidly designed service for zero dollars. Madness? Probably. Great promotional strategy to get devs in the door, shouting their praises from the rooftops? Almost certainly. As a small developer currently in the midst of building and testing our own iOS app, I can highly recommend this service to any prospective app developer. It's simple, painless, well-designed, and will save you a ton of time and effort over the long haul. We're using this now, and I can all but guarantee that we'll be using it again as our beta distribution platform of choice for future versions as well.

If you're curious what the Test Flight folks might have up their sleeve for future versions, check out their support link below... Looks like this this tool is only going to get better!

HITS
- It's free!
- Quick and easy sign-up process (for both admins and testers)
- Multiple recruitment methods (direct email, or bit.ly link for distribution via twitter, message boards, etc.)
- Automatically acquire device UDIDs, device type & OS version immediately upon tester sign-up
- Simple, intuitive interface for uploading new builds
- Easily create & manage distribution lists
- Quickly notify all testers when new builds become available
- Straightforward, build management & reporting
- Robust support, discussion & knowledge base 

MISSES
- No integrated method to acquire tester feedback or bug reports. You'll have to setup an email alias, or web forum to collect this data.
- No way to "learn" more about anonymous testers. This is fine for most cases, but a quick/integrated method to request additional, demographic info, or even the ability to fire out a brief survey would be a welcome addition!

LINKS
http://www.testflightapp.com
http://support.testflightapp.com/kb/the-future-of-testflight/upcoming-features

Find this article helpful? Have any other iOS development tools or apps in your arsenal that you'd care to share? Leave a comment, or say hi on Twitter @sleepngGiant. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

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Billed as a prototype presentation app, Realizer (developed in tandem by Rethink Canada and Nascent Digital) pretty much comes as advertised, with a couple of minor caveats. Simply put, Realizer is a tool that helps iOS devs better "realize" their app ideas by providing a simple, straight-forward platform to upload and link prototype sketches, wireframes, or even fully developed photoshop mockups for presentation on an iPhone or iPad. Although I've admittedly only spent a short time playing around with it, I can confidently say that Realizer will be a tool that I'll be coming back to on a regular basis for my future iOS prototyping needs.

The bulk of Realizer's firepower (and where you'll spend most of your time) is actually via a simple little web app, with only a small companion app install required to view your presentations on an iDevice. The first thing you'll see upon landing, is the standard issue, register or login affair. Signup is essentially pain-free, only requiring your email address and a password. No confirmation emails, no opt-outs, marketing, etc. You sign-up, and are immediately tossed into the site's main interface. Nice! From here, things thankfully don't get a whole lot more complex, and the entirety of the whole experience goes a little something like this:

01. Upload your screen images/wireframes
02. Open each image and draw boxes to specify a desired "hit-zones"(Draw as many as you need)
03. Select the corresponding screen you wish to link to via drop-down menu
04. Save & Exit
05. Wash. Rince. Repeat.

Once you're satisfied that all of your screen images have been uploaded and appropriately linked to one another, simply fire up the sister app on your iDevice and you're good to go. No fiddling with goofy settings, no waiting for your presentation to download. You're done, all of those hit-zones you'd speced earlier can now be tapped to bounce you from one screen to the next, giving you a great idea of how your app UI will flow, and straight-up expose any particularly bad design gaffes you may have made along the way. Need to make some minor adjustments? Fire the web app back up, and go to town. Your changes will be reflected next time you fire up the iDevice app. There-in lies the beauty of this little app. It essentially allows you to very quickly assemble all of the various screens for a potential app idea into a cohesive, fully integrated presentation that you can preview on an actual device.

At this point, I suppose I should mention what Realizer is not: A wireframing app. There are no tools included here to actually build out, or sketch indivudual screens, so you'll have to create these with another app prior to assembling a presentation with Realizer. (I recommend checking out iMockups by Endloopstudios on iPad, or Omnigraffle if you're of the hardcore UX persuasion.) The nice thing about Realizer however, is that it doesn't particularly care what you actually upload as your screens as long as they're JPGs with appropriate pixel dimensions, you're good to go. Hell, if you wanted to sketch your wires out by hand on the back of a napkin and scan them in you could.

As much as I'm on-board with Realizer in a big way, it's not without a handful of minor shortcomings. None of these are deal-breakers, and I suspect that more than a couple of them will factor into some sort of monetization stragety down the road. The current app can be had for the paltry sum of free, so I hardly think I'd be going out on too much of a limb to suggest the developer may choose to address these shortcomings as premium, paid content upgrades at some point.

Everyone knows that you typically get what you pay for, but fortunately for prospective iOS developers, Realizer offers up one of the quickest, easiest ways to prototype an app idea, and present it on an actual iDevice... For free. I'll note a handful of plusses/minuses below, but considering just how quick and painless the current, free experience is, I look forward to what Rethink/Nascent have in store down the road. A great app, that'll surely be a staple in my development toolkit for the foreseeable future.

HITS:
- Price: Free!
- Super simple, painless registration process. No opt-outs, no confirmation emails.
- Dead-simple UI with only two major functions. Upload a screen, Add some links. The quickest way to preview an iOS app idea directly on a device.
- Instant updates. Changes made to your presentation in the web app are immediately reflected when you re-launch the iOS, presentation app.
- Upload and link together any type of visual. Napkin sketch, wireframe or a polished mockup... It's upto you.

MISSES:
- Currently lacks support for landscape mode. Although a "coming soon" message is comfortingly displayed.
- No support for retina display. If you're using polished photoshop mockups, they won't look so hot on your iPhone 4.
- When viewing presentations on a device, transitions from one screen to another are a little sluggish. 1-2 seconds.
- No transitional animations in presentation mode. It'd be nice to invoke the default iOS "slide" anims when moving from screen to screen in presentation mode.
- No support for any functionality other than tapping in presentation mode. Being able to place a dropdown menu, picker, or other common iOS nav bits would be nice.

LINKS:
http://www.realizerapp.com
http://www.rethinkcanada.com
http://www.nascentdigital.com 

Find this article helpful? Say hi on Twitter @SleepngGiant

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